Archiving and Deleting People

Harvest won’t allow you to delete people that have tracked time or expenses. Instead, Administrators can archive them. Archiving people allows you to add other people to your account without changing your Harvest plan. An archived person’s data remains intact and accessible for reports and invoices. Restoring that person is easy and possible at any time.

If a person doesn’t have any time or expense entries, an Administrator can either archive them or delete them from your account. This link provides more information about the difference between archiving and deleting in Harvest.

Archiving a person from the Team page will not automatically update the monthly or yearly charge on your Harvest account. Monthly accounts can update their user count in the Billing Information section of Settings (upper right corner). Yearly accounts should get in touch with us to reduce their user count and receive a prorated refund.

How to Archive a Person

Administrators can archive people who have tracked time or expenses in Harvest.

Go to Team and click the Actions dropdown to the right of the relevant team member’s name.

Select Archive.

Keep in mind that if you restore this person in the future, you’ll need to add them back to projects one by one.

Archived People and Your Harvest Subscription

The cost of a Harvest subscription is calculated based on the number of user seats in your plan. There is no limit to the number of archived people you can have in your account. However, we will continue to charge you for archived people until you edit your payment plan.

After you archive a person, you can invite a new person to fill the unused seat in your plan. Alternately, you can downgrade your user count to pay less per month or year.

If you have a monthly plan, you can adjust your subscription from Settings (upper right corner) to reflect your new user total.

If you have a yearly plan, you can contact us to reduce your user count and prorate you a refund on your unused person.

Archiving people can be especially useful for companies that have part-time or seasonal staff. It’s easy to update your plan from month to month and only pay for the number of users you need.

How Archiving Affects Usage and Data

Archiving people will move them from the main Team overview to an archived list (which you can view by clicking Manage Archived People below the list of active team members). This allows you to add new people in their place without increasing your user count. Those archived people will no longer be able to sign in to Harvest, and they’ll also be archived from all of their projects.

All of an archived person’s time will remain accessible for reporting and invoicing. Their time will still be viewable in Reports, but not in Timesheets.

If you’re filtering for Team in a detailed time or expense report and want to include one or more archived people in the results, note that you’ll first need to check the Include archived items in filters box to be able to select them in the filter. If you’re running the report for Everyone, any time or expenses tracked by archived people that fit the other parameters will automatically be included even if you don’t check that box.

If you’d like to downgrade your payment plan after archiving a person, see here.

How to Restore an Archived Person

You can restore an archived person at any time. To do this:

Go to Team and click the Manage Archived People button below the list of active team members.

Click into the person’s profile, then click the Restore button.

Note: If the person didn’t accept their invitation to join Harvest before being archived, they’ll be emailed a new invitation when you restore them.

Restoring people will not automatically restore them on projects they were previously assigned to. If you need to reassign an unarchived person to a project that they were assigned to so they can track time and expenses again, follow these steps:

Go to Projects and click the Actions menu to the right of the project you’d like to edit.

Select Edit; you’ll be dropped into the Edit Project form.

Scroll to the Team section and click the Reassign button next to the person’s name to assign them to the project again.

Click Update Project at the bottom of the page.

How to Delete a Person

Administrators can delete a person if they don’t have any time or expense entries. If you only see the option to archive, please first delete all of the user’s time and expense entries one by one in the Time > Timesheet and Expenses sections. To delete a person from your account, follow these steps:

Go to Team and click the Actions dropdown to the right of the relevant team member’s name.

Select Delete and confirm.

Note: When you delete a person, their name will be removed from the history of any invoices or estimates that they created or edited. The date and action taken will be listed, but their name will be replaced with Deleted User.